The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia's history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

"He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," she earlier told the court. "I didn't realise at first that he wasn't speaking metaphorically."

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

A senior Japanese politician has been forced to apologise after sparking outrage by appearing to condone rape.

Seiichi Ota, a lawmaker with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), said at a debate on Japan's declining birth rate that at least gang rapists had a healthy appetite for sex.

"Gang rape shows the people who do it are still vigorous, and that is OK. I think that might make them close to normal," the former cabinet minister told a symposium.

Female legislators issued a joint statement on Friday condemning the remarks as an insult to all women.

One legal official said he thought the comments showed that Japanese society was too accepting of rape.

Mr Ota told reporters on Friday that he deeply regretted the "inappropriate, exaggerated expression" after he was reprimanded by LDP secretary-general Taku Yamasaki.

The remarks came as the veteran politician attributed the country's declining population to a lack of courage among Japanese men to enter into married life, the Mainichi Shimbun reported.

Asked by the debate's moderator whether this explained the behaviour of five college students who were arrested earlier this month for gang raping a peer, Mr Ota said that rape showed a healthy attitude.

"I know I'll get in trouble for saying that, though," he reportedly added.

Later he told the paper that his comments needed to be considered in context.

"If you only took what I said, well of course it would be regarded as extremely careless remark. I wanted to add that rape is a serious crime that should be punished severely, but the topic had changed and I wasn't given the chance to speak any further."

"I think the fact that such comments were reported made victims... and many women feel unpleasant, so I want to reconsider and express my apologies," he told reporters.

PM censure

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said the remarks were inexcusable.

"He deserves to be criticised. Rape is an atrocious act of cowardice and has nothing to do with virile qualities," the leader told reporters.

"I don't understand why he should make such a comment," he added.

Yasuyuki Takai, vice chairman of the Japan Federation of Bar Association's committee on victim support, said Mr Ota's remarks were indicative of Japanese society's passive attitude to rape, which often goes unreported.

"It shows that in Japan, rape is not thought of enough as an awful act... Japan's social views against incidents of rape need to be made more strict," Mr Takai told the French news agency AFP.

Prison sentences for rape in Japan range from two to 15 years, but it is unusual for a sentence to be more than five years.

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p.s. Mr. Ota didn't get fired for that comment, he was even later appointed to be the agricultural minister. Unfortunately for him, he sucked at his job and was forced to quit:

You are hardly one to comment on whether or not a woman who has been gang raped has endured trauma, or to make such generalizations. After all, you couldn't even hack a short stint in a very short war without returning, by your own admission, so psychologically impaired that you are now compelled to live on a disability pension.